Gaming, in brief

Apple faces a claim for 2 billion pounds over how it brought in App Tracking Transparency, the prompt that asks whether an app may follow you into other apps. [1]

The claim was filed at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, the London court that hears competition cases, by a company set up for it called ATT Collective Action Limited. [1]

Apple added the prompt in 2021 in the iOS 14.5 update, and since then an app has needed permission before it can read data tracked across other apps. [1]

The claim says other companies' apps must get consent twice, once under data protection law and again through a prompt Apple writes, while Apple applies less restrictive standards to its own advertising. [1]

It also says Apple never consulted app developers before making the change. [1]

Ann Pope, who was a senior antitrust director at the UK Competition and Markets Authority, directs the company bringing the claim. [1]

Luke Streatfeild, a partner at the law firm Hausfeld, is the lead solicitor. [1]

Every UK app developer that earned money from adverts inside other companies' iOS apps, or paid to attract users, is represented automatically. [1]

Mobile games are where this lands hardest. The analysts Ampere Analysis say the change was especially damaging for older franchises like Angry Birds, which lean on paid advertising to find players. [1]

Regulators in France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Romania have all investigated the prompt. [1]

France and Italy have already fined Apple more than 200 million pounds between them, and Apple settled with Germany's regulator in August 2026. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the tribunal lets the claim proceed, because until it does nobody rules on whether Apple's own advertising really worked to a different standard.

Pokemon Champions is a battle game that runs on Switch, Switch 2 and phones, and every fight is worked out on The Pokemon Company's servers rather than on the device. [2] That is why the phone version and the console version play almost identically. [2] Phones were not allowed at this year's World Championships. Since 1 September some local tournaments accept them, while regional events and above still require Switch hardware. [2] The game's producer, Masaaki Hoshino, gave two reasons: the Switch 2 looks better, and there are too many different phones. [2]

Why it matters. The tournament handbook already lets organisers hand players hardware for streamed matches, so a sharper picture could be arranged without barring anyone's phone. [2] For a player without a Switch, the gap between playing well and competing seriously is a sentence in a rulebook.

Sony said in July it will stop making PlayStation 5 discs, ending production in 2028. [3][6] Players have objected at every event since, filling comment sections and flooding the chat at its September showcase with no-disc-no-buy messages and calls for Destiny 3. [4][5] Sony has now published a harassment policy for Japan. It bans threats, abuse and intimidation, and also persistent and repeated demands and requests unrelated to products or services. [3] Breaking it can cost a customer support access, and Sony says it may involve law enforcement. [3]

Why it matters. Sony decides both what to stop selling and which complaints about that decision count as harassment. [3] The company says its list of banned behaviour is not exhaustive, and has not said how it will judge a persistent complaint. [3]

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is Capcom's first main game in the series since 2006, set in a reimagined Edo-period Kyoto. [7] It entered Steam's sales chart at No. 6 on Friday, with about 40,000 people playing on day one against a rival launch in The Blood of Dawnwalker. [7] Twenty-four hours later it was the No. 1 seller on Steam, and SteamDB counted 74,575 players on Saturday. [7] Reviews average 85 on Metacritic, with several critics calling the combat repetitive. [7]

Why it matters. Capcom is the one large publisher having a good year while Xbox and Sony cut, and this is the clearest number behind that reputation. [7][8]

Capcom, the Japanese maker of Resident Evil, Street Fighter and Monster Hunter, is the large publisher most often held up as the exception to the industry's bad run. [8] The culture site The Ringer interviewed current and former staff about it. [8] A former employee based in the United States said Western studios put too much into project management: too many hours in Jira, the task-tracking software, and production shaped by software-development habits. [8] At Capcom, the same person said, producers argue with directors about what will land with players. [8]

Why it matters. Capcom's own recovery followed a bad stretch in the early 2010s when it tried to compete with Call of Duty. [8] The account is one anonymous person's, not a study.

Polygon's running ranking of Game of the Year contenders still has Resident Evil Requiem first, where it sat in January. [9] The site calls 2026 the weakest field in years. [9] Grand Theft Auto 6 has been the presumed winner since before the year began, and Rockstar has let almost nobody play it. [9] The games expected to fill second place did not: The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and the co-op game Orbitals all landed at mild approval rather than acclaim. [9]

Why it matters. Publishers are now sprinting to ship before GTA 6 arrives, among them Marvel's Wolverine, Gears of War: E-Day and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, and Polygon rates none of them likely to reach 90 on Metacritic. [9]

Double Fine, the San Francisco studio founded by Tim Schafer, left Microsoft in July and is independent again. [10][11] It has now revealed Thank You Bus Driver, a driving game where you collect passengers and slap the ones who break the rules. [10] It is the first release from Double Fine Action Labs, a label the studio set up in August for small games it can announce and ship quickly. [10] The studio also put Keeper, its last Xbox game, on PlayStation 5 and cut the price of Kiln. [11]

Why it matters. Its Kickstarter for a filmed game jam has passed its goal; backers voted on 26 pitches, four of which become prototypes and one a finished game. [11] Founder Tim Schafer says nobody can shut the studio down now except him. [10]

Neon Giant is a small studio whose cyberpunk shooter The Ascent has had more than 12 million players since 2021. [12] Its creative director and co-founder, Arcade Berg, told IGN the team wanted to continue the series at the time but could not staff or fund two projects at once. [12] Neon Giant is now owned by Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG, and Berg says the two have built a franchise plan together. [12] He would not give details. A large update to the first game is due in November 2026. [12]

Why it matters. What changed is who is paying. Krafton also publishes Neon Giant's next game, No Law, so both projects now sit inside one owner's plan. [12]

The Steam Deck is Valve's handheld PC, out since February 2022 and now sold only in its OLED version. [13] Valve has raised its price by as much as 300 dollars. [13] Engadget puts that down to a memory shortage: AI companies are buying enormous quantities of RAM for data centres, and prices across the tech industry have followed. [13] Console prices have risen this year rather than fallen, the opposite of how game hardware normally ages. [13] The Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Lenovo Legion Go now beat the Deck on frame rates. [13]

Why it matters. The OLED model brought a better screen and battery in 2023 and no real speed gain, so buyers now pay more for the same performance because a different industry wants the parts. [13]

Go is a board game from China, at least 1,400 years older than chess, in which players surround territory with stones. [14] Shin Jin-seo, the world's top-ranked player, won an official three-game series against the KataGo engine on 21 July. [14] The Korea Economic Daily reported it as the first time a human has done that. [14] Shin played with a two-stone handicap, which is standard for matches against top engines, and lost the opening game before winning the series. [14] Ten years ago AlphaGo beat the grandmaster Lee Sedol decisively. [14]

Why it matters. Shin, who is 26, said he would like to face the machine again on worse terms than these. [14]

Civilization 7 is Firaxis's strategy game, and its last age currently stops in 1950, so nuclear submarines and long-range missiles are missing from it. [15] Firaxis has outlined a free update called Arc of Tomorrow, due in 2027, that carries the game to 2050 and adds those weapons. [15] The studio says it will be bigger in scope than May's Test of Time overhaul, which brought the game its highest Steam player count in more than a year. [15] An expansion called Earthrise was announced alongside it. [15]

Why it matters. Steam reviews still sit at Mixed, 51% positive, after more than a year of updates, so Firaxis is repairing a launch rather than building on one. [15]

Rain World is a 2017 survival platformer from the small studio Videocult, in which you play a creature called a slugcat, foraging for food and reaching shelter before lethal rain arrives. [16] Its publisher Akupara Games announced a Rain World Anthology Edition at its first showcase, bundling the game with its Downpour and The Watcher expansions. [16] It comes to PlayStation 5, Switch and, for the first time, Switch 2. [16] Serenity Forge is making the physical copies, including a collector's edition with an art book and a soundtrack. [16]

Why it matters. A nine-year-old game with a small, devoted following is being put back on a shop shelf in the same week Sony is taking its own discs off one. [16][3]

Stardew Valley revived the farming game in 2016, and almost every farm game since has been built the same way. [17] You inherit a run-down farm. A village of about a dozen possible friends and partners sits nearby, and the crafting, mining and fishing all feed back into rebuilding the farm and the town. [17] Interest exploded during the pandemic and the copies multiplied without changing form. [17] Polygon argues a new group of farm games is finally breaking that pattern. [17] The old one runs back through Story of Seasons to Harvest Moon 64. [17]

Why it matters. A formula that keeps a studio's lights on is the hardest thing to walk away from, which is why this genre stood still for a decade. [17]

Atlus is remaking its role-playing game Persona 4 and is recasting every English-speaking part. [18] At a PAX West panel it showed a trailer for Kanji Tatsumi, one of the game's best-known characters, played previously by Troy Baker and later by Matt Mercer. [18] The new voice is Daman Mills, currently Frieza in Dragon Ball and before that in Borderlands 3 and Final Fantasy VII Remake. [18] Mills has worked with Atlus before, on Persona 3 Reload and Shin Megami Tensei 5. [18]

Why it matters. Polygon calls Kanji an early example of a game character exploring his own gender identity inside the game, which is why the casting is being watched closely. [18]

Zach Cregger, who directed the horror films Barbarian and Weapons, is making a Resident Evil film that uses none of the games' characters and retells none of their stories. [19] It is set in the same world and nods at the games' ideas instead. [19] Fans have objected since that was confirmed. [19] Cregger told the site The Playlist that promoting it has felt like an apology tour, and like running for office to stop people calling him a LARPer. [19] He earlier told IGN he had been naive. [19]

Why it matters. Cregger says he did not appreciate how long fans had been waiting for the story of Leon, one of the games' main characters. [19]

Microsoft has published the first September batch for Xbox Game Pass, its game subscription. [20] The largest name is Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the 2020 entry made by Raven Software. [20] Speedrunners 2: King of Speed launches straight into the service, and Runescape: Dragonwilds joins on its first day, having already sold more than a million copies in early access. [20] Smaller additions include Shelldiver, Dice a Million, The Royal Writ and Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage. [20]

Why it matters. Day-one launches are the expensive half of a subscription, and Jagex's Dragonwilds arrives having already proved that people will pay for it. [20]

Medieval Dynasty is a survival and building game set in the Middle Ages, played alone or with friends, and sold on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox as well as being in Game Pass. [21] Its makers have dated two paid add-ons. [21] The Hunting Pack arrives on 22 September 2026. [21] A larger one, The Backwood, opens a new area and is not due until 2027; a new trailer showed how it plays. [21]

Why it matters. The studio is still selling new pieces of the game it already has rather than building a sequel to it. [21]

NHL 27 is EA's annual ice hockey game, made by its Vancouver studio. [22] IGN's review says the hockey itself is still strong and that nothing about it has got worse. [22] It also says there are no new modes at all. [22] Franchise, Build a Pro, World of Chel and HUT are the same list as last year, and the menus are identical to NHL 26's. [22] They are close enough, the review says, that a player could think they had loaded the wrong game. [22]

Why it matters. An annual sports game sells on its licence and its roster, so there is little pressure to rebuild anything underneath. [22]

Kingdom Hearts is Square Enix's series in which Disney characters and settings are stitched into an original story. [23] An extended trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4, shown at D23, Disney's own fan event, gave a first look at the Land of the Dead from Coco. [23] GameSpot notes that Disney's purchases over the years, Marvel and Star Wars among them, have made the list of worlds the series could technically use enormous. [23]

Why it matters. The series' supply of places to visit grows every time Disney buys a company, without Square Enix doing anything at all. [23]